More energy sector layoffs expected

A prolonged period of weak oil prices is expected to result in additional energy sector job losses, as the industry fails to overcome profitability concerns due to oversupply.

That’s the takeaway from a Wall Street Journalstory that points to nearly 50,000 energy job losses in the past three months, according to Graves & Co., a Houston energy consultancy. Part of what is worrisome to WSJ is that major companies like Halliburton HAL and Baker Hughes BHI, two oil-field services providers that are poised to merge, are planning to double the job cuts announced in February. There are also concerns that job cuts, which initially focused on blue-collar employees, will widen and sting engineers and scientists.

While some had hoped oil’s price would rally in the back half of the year, a weak performance in July implies that a turnaround is still far away. That’s because oil supplies remain robust, and there are also persistent concerns that a slowdown in the Chinese economy will hurt demand for oil in one of the world’s largest economies.

Additional job cuts for the energy sector would come after a tough first half of 2015. Over that period of time, heavier-than-expected downsizing pushed the midyear total to its highest level since 2010, according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The accelerated downsizing was largely due to the drop in oil prices, which hurt the energy and industrial goods sectors. Lower oil prices were to blame for 69,582 job cuts in the first six months of 2015, the firm reported, second only to cuts blamed on “restructuring.”

Microsoft set to announce huge new round of layoffs

D-day for many Microsoft employees could come soon, as the company is said to be readying a significant round of job cuts.

The layoffs are expected to include those working in Microsoft’s hardware group, according to people briefed on the plans in a report by The New York Times.

This follows an announcement last year that the company would be letting go of around 18,000 employees, a number that represents 18.18% of Microsoft’s overall workforce, and counts as one of the largest round of layoffs by any company.

Microsoft’s MSFT management have been preparing staff members of this news for some time. In late June, CEO Satya Nadella sent a company-wide email rallying employees around a revised mission statement: “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” according to Geekwire. However, he also warned of the coming times ahead, saying that Microsoft would need to “make some tough choices in areas where things are not working and solve hard problems in ways that drive customer value,” as mentioned in the Times report.

The job cuts are a part of an aggressive restructuring of Microsoft’s business. In June, it was reported that AOL would be taking over Microsoft’s ad sales business, a move that would affect around 1,200 Microsoft employees. Last year, Microsoft acquired Nokia in a $7.2 billion deal that they hoped would make them a prominent player in the smartphone market, where their Windows Phone operating system have continued to cede ground to the two leading mobile platforms, iOS from Apple AAPL and Android from Google GOOG.

But smart money is that Microsoft MSFT will be chopping more jobs, mostly from the mobile phone ranks. The phone business was folded into a new Windows and Devices unit under Terry Myerson in a reorg two weeks ago, with former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop exiting at that time.

So will history repeat itself? In an internal memo that leaked last week, Nadella talked about tough choices to come, so folks are on edge in Redmond.

The most recent headcount on Microsoft’s web site from June 2014 lists 128,000 employees; others estimate that current employee count is at about 118,000, which does not represent a net loss of 18,000 jobs. That’s probably because, much to Wall Street’s chagrin, Microsoft kept hiring in strategic areas, while culling people from less, um strategic areas.

What Michael Dell and the United Nations think is critical for creating jobs

It’s not everyday that drug-sniffing dogs and security guards snoop around a San Francisco tech office. But it’s not everyday that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Dell CEO Michael Dell stop by for a town hall meeting about entrepreneurship.

The event, which also included an appearance by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, was held Friday at a start-up incubator to promote the idea that governments and businesses should work together to ensure that entrepreneurs get the resources and support they need to create businesses.

Last year, the United Nations Foundation, the U.N.’s charity arm, chose Dell, founder of the namesake tech giant, to be its global advocate for entrepreneurship. In this role, Dell has been busy promoting what he feels are the necessary skills of a good entrepreneur including risk taking and individualism. He acknowledged those qualities are more difficult to channel in certain countries outside the United States. But he said those skills are necessary to create the 600 million jobs by 2025 that will be needed to accommodate the growing workforce.

Dell pointed out that “70 to 90% of new jobs in the world are not created by big companies.” Job creation is fueled mostly by newly formed small businesses, the kinds similar to San Francisco startups, he argued.

Ban agreed with Dell, saying “Tech entrepreneurs have an extraordinary opportunity to contribute with these efforts.”

The audience of CEOs and company founders dressed mostly in suits and ties rather than the Silicon Valley’s more casual uniform of jeans and hoodies, occasionally clapped and nodded in agreement.

No one at the event mentioned the fact that the entrepreneurs that helm innovative startups often face difficult challenges dealing with employees as they grow to the size of a company like Dell. Dell, for example, has laid off thousands of employees as part of the company’s restructuring plans. The same is true for Hewlett-Packard HPQ, which is trying to eliminate around 55,000 jobs to make for a leaner operation.

Indeed, one of the startups praised at the event and a one-time resident of the RocketSpace facility is at the center of its own labor controversy: Uber, the popular ride-hailing service. It has been criticized for using contractors, not employees, as drivers. In a recent ruling, the California labor commission disagreed with the way it classified one of its contractor drivers and should reimburse her for driving expenses. It served to further fuel the debate about Uber’s business practices and highlighted the minefield startups must navigate when bulking up their workforces.

It’s great that Dell is trying to lift people from poverty through his work with the United Nations. But when the small young businesses he is targeting grow up, they should also take care of their employees and ensure that they are able to keep their jobs.

The balance between being a profitable company beholden to shareholders and being a corporate do-gooder that provides people with jobs becomes more tricky to pull off. While a large percentage of new jobs in the world may be created with new businesses, it’s often that the older businesses are the ones doing the massive job cutting.

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Hewlett-Packard shares more detail on its plans to split the company

Breaking up may be hard to do, but for Hewlett-Packard it’s apparently a necessity for the company to streamline its business.

In an earnings call for HP’s second quarter report for 2015, CEO Meg Whitman wasted no time to give analysts an update on the tech titan’s efforts to split up its business into two separate companies. One company, to be named Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, will focus on selling technology like servers and data center gear to businesses. The other, to be called HP Inc., will sell printers and personal computers.

“Today I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right thing to do,” Whitman said as she proceeded to explain that the total dis-synergies—a fancy word for costs—for the separation will equate to $400 million to $450 million “divided equally between the two companies.”

“As separate companies, we will have a sharper focus on the markets we serve,” Whitman said.

As a whole, HP HPQ took in $25.5 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2015 compared to the $27.3 billion it raked in the previous year during the same time period.

Breaking it down by segment, however, it’s clear to see that HP’s enterprise business has a lot more momentum going for it rather than its PC and printer business.

While the revenue from HP’s enterprise group dropped to $6.56 billion from $6.63 the previous year partly due to a decline in the company’s storage and networking products, its industry standard servers saw $3.12 billion in revenue compared to the $2.83 billion it generated in 2014 during the same time period. HP’s lineup of industry standard servers, also known as commodity servers, promise businesses more customizable hardware that they can use in their data centers to take on specific tasks like data processing or networking.

HP’s printing and personal systems group, which includes PCs and printers, shrunk to $13.19 billion in the second quarter of 2015 from the $14.01 billion it took in 2014 during the same three-month time period. Whitman said that the PC market was weaker than she expected at the beginning of the year, so it’s hard to see that segment taking off anytime soon.

By splintering off these two different business segments, HP stands to create two different companies in which one seems to be on an upward slope, especially if the market for commodity servers continues to increase. It’s the same trend Intel INTC appears to be seeing, in which the demand for more customizable data center hardware is something worth betting a company’s bottom line on.

Of course, separating HP into two companies doesn’t come cheap, as shown by the $400 million to $450 million HP stands to lose during the split. But the company is hoping that its cost-cutting efforts, like the 55,000 jobs HP plans to eliminate by the end of 2015, will help offset that number.

HP executive vice president and CFO Cathie Lesjak even indicated that the creation of “two new efficient” companies will present “significant opportunities for cost reductions.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that translates to more layoffs.

Why Iowa is mad at IBM

IBM has drawn the ire of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley over reports the company is firing hundreds of employees in the state.

Grassley wrote a letter to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty recently seeking answers, and Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the company cut about 700 jobs in Dubuque, Iowa, where it opened a global delivery center in 2009. The Dubuque location once employed as many as 1,300 people, but had reportedly shrunk to more than 800 employees even before this year’s layoffs.

The layoffs follow roughly $50 million that city and the state of Iowa spent on incentives to lure the company. IBM didn’t comment on specific employment figures. “IBM is constantly investing in skills to meet the demands of our clients, especially in areas such as Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security,” spokesman Adam Pratt told Bloomberg.

IBM has also drawn the ire of local officials in Columbia, Missouri, where the company also reportedly engaged in recent layoffs. Last month, Missouri suspended tax credits IBM had been receiving as part of a previous promise to create up to 800 jobs at its service center in Columbia. The state suspended the incentives after employment at the center fell below a 500-job threshold.

Target’s promised layoffs are here at cost of $100 million

Target TGT told 1,700 unlucky workers in Minneapolis on Tuesday that they were out of a job as part of a previously announced round of cuts.

Last week, the discount retailer’s top executives unveiled a multi-year plan to Wall Street aimed at re-inventing its business and saving $2 billion in costs in the next two years, including the elimination of “several thousand” positions, primarily at its headquarters. The goal of the job cuts is to make the company a “much more agile, effective organization” by reducing the bureaucracy that has held Target back and made it slow to react to changes in customer behavior, notably the shift to online shopping in recent years.

In addition to the 1,700 job cuts—or which Target will incur a $100 million charge this quarter, according to a regulatory filing—the company also permanently closed 1,400 open jobs. (Target employs some 366,000 people in all.)

“While today’s news is difficult, it’s important to know that we will continue to make investments in our business and team—particularly in areas such as digital, personalization, data and analytics, and engineering—to position Target for future success,” Target spokeswoman Molly Snyder told Fortune in an e-mailed statement.

Before the layoffs, Target employed about 13,000 people in Minneapolis, as well as thousands more at area stores, making it one of the largest employers in Minnesota. The layoffs aroused the concerns of Governor Mark Dayton, whose father and uncles founded Target in 1962. Target CEO Brian Cornell met with Dayton this week and assured him Target would keep its headquarters there, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.

The Star-Tribune also reported that employees carrying boxes and personal belongings could be seen leaving the company’s main building in downtown Minneapolis on Tuesday morning. The job cuts began last week with some senior executives, the paper said, citing Target employees it had interviewed.

Target said each laid-off employee will get at least 15 weeks of pay as well as additional severance amounts based on their length of time with the retailer.

As detailed in a recent cover story in Fortune, Target lost some of its cachet in recent years, weighed down by a heavy bureaucracy that stifled innovation and CEO Brian Cornell is making it a priority to change Target’s culture.

RBS cutting up to 14,000 investment banking jobs by 2019

Royal Bank of Scotland could be cutting as many as 80% of the jobs in its investment banking unit over the next four years as part of a massive restructuring meant to turn around the struggling bank’s fortunes.

The Financial Timesreported Tuesday that RBS RBS, which has been scaling down its investment banking business, plans to layoff up to 14,000 people in that unit by 2019. The majority of the job cuts will come in the U.S. and Asia, according to FT. The Wall Street Journal had said last week that the bank could cut more than 1,000 investment-banking jobs in the U.S.

Last week, the bank unveiled its restructuring plan — code-named Project Brown — that includes efforts to reduce the bank’s size and turn most of its focus to U.K. operations. The bank said it would retreat from 25 of the countries where it currently has operations, reducing its international locations to 13 countries. The bank is also selling its North American loans business to Japan-based Mizuho Financial Group for roughly $3 billion.

RBS CEO Ross McEwan is trying to turn around the bank, which posted its seventh-straight annual loss last week. RBS reported an annual loss of $5.4 billion in 2014 after taking a write down of more than $6 billion on its U.S. arm, Citizens Bank.

Target to shift big chunk of spending to tech from stores

Target TGT is best known for its nearly 1,800 big-box stores. But it’s betting its future on grabbing its share of digital commerce.

This fiscal year, Target will spend about $2.1 billion on capital projects, about the same as it did in 2010. But back then, the bulk of the spending went to new stores and remodels. This year, company executives said at a meeting with Wall Street analysts to unveil its five-year plan, $1 billion of that budget, or just about half, on its digital capabilities, cognizant of how much shopping, from browsing to actually buying, actually goes through smart phones.

Target CFO John Mulligan told Wall Street he expects sales at stores to rise 1%, and for digital sales to rise 40% this year.

The discount retailer, which was slow to adapt to the rise of e-commerce—digital sales represent about 3% of total sales. In 2014, Target rewrote 75% of the code in its e-commerce platform, and now its website is considered by e-commerce experts to be up to par with its rivals and in some areas head, namely mobile shopping.

It is planning to enable 350 of its stores to ship online orders by October 2015 from 139 now to speed up delivery and better compete better against Amazon.com AMZN and Wal-Mart Stores WMT. Last week, Target announced lowered the minimum online order size needed to get free shipping by half to $25, undercutting Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Best Buy BBY

All this will pressure its gross profit margins, lowering it by 0.6 percentage points over the next five years. But Mulligan said it was worth it: shopper who navigate between stores and Target’s digital channels shop nearly three times as much.

As detailed in a cover story in Fortune, Target is striving to stop being what its executives call a “fast follower” in e-commerce—a company that lets others set the agenda and quickly mimics their pricing—and take the lead. Target showed its newfound aggressive this past holiday season by being the first in its peer group to offer free shipping on all orders regardless of size, a sharp contrast with earlier holiday seasons when the retailer took its cues from the competition and was a laggard in e-commerce.

The company also detailed plans to save $2 billion in the next two years including the elimination of “several thousand” positions.

How to survive a management shakeup

Dear Annie: Late last year, the company where I work announced a merger that is actually turning out to be more of an acquisition. The executive team from the other, somewhat bigger company is in charge now, and they’re looking at how to combine the two entities, including laying off some of us whose jobs overlap with their own managers’ positions. Some of my colleagues have started (discreetly) job hunting, on the assumption that their days here are numbered. But I just got here a couple of years ago, I like what I’m doing, and I’d really rather stay. My question is, how realistic is that? Any suggestions for improving the odds of holding on to my job, without coming across to the new bosses as too political? — Holding My Breath

Dear H.M.B.: Considering that mergers and acquisitions announced worldwide shot up 47% last year (total value: $3.5 trillion), their highest level since 2007, and since many of those deals are just now coming to fruition, you can be sure that plenty of other employees are in the same boat.

But even people whose employers haven’t merged will, sooner or later, have to learn the art of impressing a new management team. “For one reason or another, the average person will have 10 or more new bosses over the course of his or her career,” notes Teresa Taylor, a former telecommunications executive who now sits on a dozen boards of directors. “You can sit back and watch the change happen, or you can influence it.

“Don’t worry about being ‘too political,’” she adds. “Getting to know the new people in charge, and making a good impression on them, isn’t about politics. It’s about figuring out how you fit in now. If the idea of asking your new boss out for lunch or drinks bugs you, think of it as networking, which is really the same thing.”

Taylor speaks from experience. She was one of a large group of product managers at Qwest when US West bought the company in 2000. US West had its own product managers, so layoffs seemed inevitable. Taylor got busy making herself so valued by the new team that she got promoted to a newly created executive vice president position, overseeing all the product managers from both companies.

How did she pull that off? Taylor says these three steps worked for her:

Bring solutions, not problems. “There’s nothing worse for a new boss than to have a parade of people in her office who can describe in great detail what is wrong,” Taylor says. “Some people have truly made an art form out of defining the problem.” Don’t be one of them. It’s helpful to bring up things you believe need fixing, but only if you can identify at least three possible solutions.

Read the tea leaves. “Try to identify the needs of the new boss. If you were in her shoes, what would you want to know?” says Taylor. “There’s no question that the goals and the culture are going to change, so embrace that by observing the differences.” If possible, demonstrate that you want to be part of the change by “showing initiative and completing a project no one asked you to do,” she adds. “Often, in an acquisition, people’s first impulse is to try to hide, but that’s a mistake. Jump in. Be engaged. Pick something that you’ve always been good at, and let it shine.”

Be flexible. A merger is a good time to dust off your resume, even if you’re counting on staying. “A common practice is to have people re-interview for the jobs they’ve already got, or for other jobs that have opened up in other parts of the reorganized company,” Taylor points out. “It’s smart to be thought of as ready for any assignment, because the company and your role in it will continue to evolve, even if a particular move doesn’t seem like a great option at the time.”

That idea, too, comes from Taylor’s own career. After three years as product management chief, she got appointed head of human resources. “It seemed ridiculous to me. I was one of those people who always snickered about HR,” she says. “Here I was, a sales and marketing person, suddenly in charge of union contracts, employee benefits, and so on.” Still, she took the assignment, which “turned out to be a big part of what qualified me” for a promotion to chief operating officer two years later.

“Change is never easy. But even if you end up somewhere else in the company from where you are now and it doesn’t seem ideal, make the best of it,” she suggests. “You never know where it will lead.” Good luck.

Talkback: If you’ve ever survived a merger or acquisition with your job intact, or you ended up with a better one, how did you do it? Leave a comment below.